In prior art conveyor systems for handling bottles in spraying or other processing operations, it has always been a problem to adjust the system for different sizes and different heights of bottles. Where adjustable platforms have been provided, it has been necessary to have these isolated from the inclined conveyor belt carrying bottles thereto with a dead space transfer point between the inclined conveyor and the separate horizontal conveyor. This causes problems of bottles knocking inasmuch as each bottle as it enters the dead space becomes stationary until it is pushed thereoff by the next bottle behind it and that in turn, in addition to the problems of breaking or surface marring, has interferred with means for uniformly spacing bottles beneath the overhead carriers. In the present invention a continuous belt passing over a total of 4 rollers includes an inclined portion which is contiguous with a horizontal portion thereby eliminating this problem of dead space transfer. The horizontal portion is mounted on two screw jacks so that it may be raised or lowered and this is accomplished without increasing or otherwise varying the tension or length of the continuous conveyor belt. The path traversed by the belt in the present invention defines a parallelogram having an upper horizontal portion, a lower horizontal portion and upper and lower angularly inclined portions. The path length of the conveyor belt remains constant regardless of the height of the upper horizontal portion.
Furthermore, while various neck gripping bottle carriers have been devised heretofore, they have all had some limitations such as for example requiring that the clam shells be particularly oriented so that the bottle necks enter the open side before the clam shells are closed, and also with the prior art overhead carriers there has been no provision for protecting the carrier structure from spray materials which may be applied to the bottles, thus giving rise to accumulated deposits which ultimately interfere with the normal and proper functioning of the bottle gripping members. The present invention overcomes these drawbacks of the prior art by providing means for dropping the overhead conveyors onto aligned bottles therebeneath without requiring particular angular orientation of the neck gripping clam shell bottle carriers. Additionally, in the present invention the overhead bottle carrier devices are provided with an external cylindrical shield member which functions not only to lock the clam shell grippers on the necks of the bottles but also to protect the clam shell gripping mechanism from the deleterious effects of accumulated spray materials or other ingredients at a bottle processing station. The positive locking mechanism of the overhead bottle carriers in the present invention eliminates any possibility of a bottle being dropped until the processing operations are completed and the overhead carrier chain returns the bottles to a discharge platform onto which they are placed for transfer to a downward inclined ramp and thence onto a conntinuous moving exit conveyor. The inclined conveyor belt and the overhead claim shell neck gripping carriers of the present invention function both for picking up bottles to be processed and for discharging finished bottles as they leave the processing station.